The advent of the World Wide Web and advances in technology have served as a catalyst for the ubiquity of computing devices, as well as the introduction of increasingly more complex applications and services. For example, such services may utilize complex, multimodal interfaces to input and output information. Moreover, these computing devices continue to gain ever increasing processing capability such that multitasking is now commonplace. Consequently, a host of applications and associated interfaces are activated concurrently. Because of the multiplicity of applications, the users can easily be inundated with messages from these applications, thereby potentially reducing the user's productivity or efficiency with respect to utilizing the applications. Thus, management of these messages, which may be voluminous, poses a challenge for traditional operating systems.
The above issue is exacerbated in the case of users with vision impairment; such users may typically rely on a screen reader to convey the information provided by the many applications. Unfortunately, the lack of management of the messages from these applications can easily render the output of the screen reader incoherent or incomprehensible.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can effectively manage application messages for coherent presentation to users.